The Schwartz Cloud Report

Nimbula Releases Director for Hybrid Clouds

A high-profile startup run by key founders of Amazon Web Services EC2 cloud service is shipping its first product.

Nimbula last week officially released Director 1.0, a cloud operating system that enterprise customers and service providers can install on their own servers. The software provides an EC2-like experience, according to the Mountain View, Calif.-based company.

The company came out of stealth mode last June, when it delivered the first private beta of Director, followed by a public beta in December. "The announcement of GA has been a huge catalyst to us," Buhr said. "We were talking to a lot of potential customers and prospects both with enterprises and with service providers who were waiting for us to exit beta."

The company is continuing to encourage customers to test its software. For deployments up to 40 cores, the company is offering Director free of charge. For larger installations, Nimbula is offering annual subscriptions that include support and maintenance.

While there is no shortage of cloud startups, Nimbula has an all-star cast of founders. CEO Chris Pinkham was VP of engineering at Amazon, where he was responsible for the company's worldwide hardware and software infrastructure and shepherded the EC2 project in its early days.

Also, Willem van Biljon, who wrote the business plan for EC2 and managed the original EC2 engineering team, is a Nimbula co-founder and VP of products. And Buhr himself was on the original EC2 sales and business development team.

The company has $20.75 million in funding from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital.